Its the beginning of month 11 of this crazy, incredible adventure and I just realized I am fighting something I haven’t had to fight in over 8 years.
Some of you may know (but most probably don’t know) that in my early 20’s I battled pretty severe depression. It goes back to my first semester of college where I experienced sexual assault. I battled depression for about 5 years after that. My various coping mechanisms were drugs, alcohol, smoking, ect. I also used other things to cope like shutting off my emotions and using anger as a mask to cover hurts. They became my “go-to” ways of avoiding everything. During those 5 years, I felt a feeling of numbness inside myself that I hoped I had found freedom from. Fast forward to month 11 of my World Race and I’ve found out that there are still wounds that need to be healed in all of this.
Back at training camp, I heard an analogy of how we can view our lives like an onion. We must walk along each layer, going around the entire onion, before we can reach the next layer. Constantly we walk our onions, traveling to the center of who we are, but what happens when we experience hurt? Its like someone just took a knife and cut into our onion. Now our onion has this deep cavern we must traverse. We take the steps to cross it, and happily continue walking our onion. We forget about the hurt and go on to the next layer, but suddenly one day we see that giant cavern again. Apparently whatever hurt us, cut far deeper than we imagined. It cut into multiple layers of our onion, and we must walk through that hurt many times before we get past the depth of the cut.
Well hello, Cavern. Long time no see.
To say the last couple of months have been hard would be an understatement. I have been stretched far more than I thought possible. I wish I could say I handled it gracefully, but I can’t. It wasn’t until recently that I even became fully aware of what was happening. I was facing this part of my onion again and I was completely clueless.
Things in my community had gotten rough. I was definitely not acting the way I am called to act. My heart hardened to my teammates and community. I started speaking out of anger and frustration, instead of love. I was projecting my feelings onto them and treating them poorly. I am not proud of who I have been. Actually, it was when I understood what I was doing that my depression fully sank in. I realized that I was angry and hurt and was lashing out at them because I of it. I became ashamed of myself and my actions, and that was all it took.
As I sat here typing this, my mind was still swirling over the revelation of where I was and why. You see, part of my personality is that I like knowing why. Not understanding things is very hard for me.
I had been feeling numb lately. It was honestly been something I wanted to change but didn’t know how. I had been fighting with God, begging Him to speak to me. Asking Him for answers and waiting to hear from Him. I was feeling the way I felt while I was battling depression. I wanted to be happy, but something that I didn’t understand was keeping that from being possible. You would think with the amount of times I had heard, “You should be joyful more,” or “If you were as happy all the time as you are when…” that I would have figured it out sooner. What can I say? I’ve always been stubborn when it comes to listening. I didn’t put two and two together and couldn’t see that I was slowly slipping into depression until I was already in too deep.
I had to start to try and figure out why I was feeling this way. What triggered this and what do I need to learn so that I can move past this cavern? I started processing and realized what it was that triggered me.
Back in college, the reason I ended up in the place I was at was because I was trying to please people. I was trying to make friends and do the whole “college” thing. I was struggling that first semester to make friends and felt very alone. I ended up making some poor choices trying to be someone that people wanted me to be, and I realized I was doing the exact same thing here on the race.
For the last couple of months I have tried (and failed at) being someone that I thought everyone wanted me to be. I put so much pressure on myself to become what I thought was acceptable. I wanted to become the version of myself that people who I had deemed “more important than myself” would approve of. I was constantly living a false version of who I truly am. I was putting so much pressure on myself to become this “perfect Christian” that when I made even the smallest mistake, I would shame myself because of it. Every time another moment came along that went against this ideal I had of who I was supposed to be, I would become more and more shamed and angry at myself for who I was.
This shame-spiral ultimately triggered me to fall into the depression I thought I had defeated long ago. Through trying (and failing) to please people, I had lost sight of my true identity. I didn’t know who I was, but I knew who I was acting like wasn’t good. When that was all I could see of myself, I determined that I wasn’t good.
Bam! Hello depression.
The good thing is, once I was able to identify the reason why the depression was happening, I was able to fight against it. I started reading a book called The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery. (I know it sounds riveting…) I had downloaded a bunch of books onto my kindle before leaving for this trip in October. This was one of the many recommended books that I had downloaded but never read. I had just finished reading a book and was looking for something new and the Lord directed me to this one. I wasn’t really enjoying the book or getting much out of it at first. It all seemed like things that I already knew and understood. I felt like this book may have been written for someone much younger than myself. Someone who had never known who they really are, but that is not me. I had known who I was. I just had lost her somewhere along the way and needed a little help in finding her again.
It wasn’t until the book started explaining about part-selves that I really began to understand why the Lord chose for me to read this book at this part of my journey. Here, take a look at what I mean:
“Genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcome parts of self… Many of us refuse to face our feelings of shame. They make us feel too vulnerable. So, we pretend they do not exist and hope they will go away… When we do so, however, these unwanted parts of self do not go away. They simply go into hiding… There is enormous value in naming and coming to know these excluded parts of self. My playful self, my cautious self, my exhibitionistic self, my pleasing self, my competitive self and many other faces of my self are all parts of me whether I acknowledge their presence or not. Powerful conditioning in childhood encourages us to acknowledge only the most acceptable parts of ourself. And parts of self that are not given a place at the family table become stronger, not weaker. Operating out of sight and beyond awareness, they have increasing influence on our behavior.”
Okay. That hit the nail on the head for me, but this next statement killed it:
“Christian spirituality involves acknowledging all our part-selves, exposing them to God’s love, and letting him weave them into the new person He is making. To do this, we must be willing to welcome these ignored parts as full members of the family of self, giving them a seat at the family table, and slowly allowing them to be softened and healed by love, and integrated into the whole person we are becoming.”
There was the help I was looking for. It was at once a huge relief, knowing that I could now take the steps needed to move forward. Those steps, however, are proving much harder than I anticipated. I realized there are many part-selves that I have snubbed for a very long time. There are many things about myself that I found unacceptable and therefore tried to hide. I am now working on trying to accept, love, and not shame myself for the less attractive parts of me. Instead of constantly trying to ignore these parts, I am now trying to accept them and love myself, as God would, through them. Only upon acceptance of these parts can I begin to actually change them.
Its been a long road to get to this place of understanding. I had hoped that by the end of this 11 months I would have become this version of myself that I always envisioned. I guess the Lord had better plans, and His timing is different than mine. This ticking clock of the World Race actually doesn’t mean I will become this person I want to be by the end of it. It will take a while of actually putting into practice all that I now know to become closer to that goal. I am working towards it, but I’m also learning to love who I am along the way too. I think that’s good enough for me.
I know this was long, and if you made it this far congratulations! Thanks for reading and hearing where my heart has been lately. I fly into San Francisco in 18 days and in 23 days I will land in Amarillo. I’m coming home!!! I will update you more soon about what my plans and things are for home. Until then, I love you guys!
